


Sieging the Storm Among the Rising Bones of Ruined Shadows

by Kara_luna



Series: The Grisha Trilogy No One Wanted and No One Needed [1]
Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alina is trying her best, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Childhood Friends, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Humor, Mama Alina, Some minor character death, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, baghra was NOT a good mother just saying but I still love her, sympathy but not excusing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:34:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28421784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kara_luna/pseuds/Kara_luna
Summary: Alina chose her future and maybe now that she's here, maybe now that she's got it in her grasp, maybe she realizes she made the wrong choice.There is no right and wrong in black and white letters, but there are two sides, one lighter gray than the other... And she grabs onto those shades and she sacrifices it all for the chance to go back and make it better. The war is over and the nation's crumbling, but if Alina has anything to say about it, everything will be different the second time around... except.Alina doesn't go back to the day she met her greatest enemy or the day she stumbled into an orphanage. She wakes up in a time she's never lived surrounded by the village of a boy she once knew as a man who held shadows in his bare hands and commanded armies and entire nations... And he's a child who looks at her with eyes full of light.And their story's entire plot changes.
Relationships: David Kostyk/Genya Safin, Genya Safin & Alina Starkov, Mal Oretsev/Alina Starkov, Nikolai Lantsov/Zoya Nazyalensky, The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova & Alina Starkov, The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova & Zoya Nazyalensky, The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova/Alina Starkov, Zoya Nazyalensky & Alina Starkov, Zoya Nazyalensky & Genya Safin, nikoli and alina, past - Relationship
Series: The Grisha Trilogy No One Wanted and No One Needed [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2081700
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Sieging the Storm Among the Rising Bones of Ruined Shadows

Alina regrets it. 

Loving Mal isn't like the fairytales said it would be, where your heart choses despite what your head thinks. Drawn to each other by fate and invisible red threads, destined to be, and all that. 

That's not what loving Mal is like at all. 

He was kind to her when no one else at the orphanage cared. Took beatings and punishments from Anna Kuya just so he could see her, looked at her like the sun before she could ever wield it, and though he wasn't perfect, neither was she- and she chose to love him. 

Alina doesn’t regret that she loved him as a child, despite what it cost and all she gave up for nothing. How can she regret something so solid and real in a life of wavering sun beams and smoke rising from open palms unable to grasp it?

She looked at the boy with wild hair and a wildier smile and thought to herself, yes, this is the one I want. And so he was her dream. All she wanted was a small home somewhere where she could live with him and their children, perhaps a small farm out the back, away from the world so completely that sometimes she'd forget there was anything else out there besides her little family. 

And she really did _ believe _ that. Contentment would come to her as would purpose and love and belonging. She'd really  _ truly  _ believed that she would find her place in a little modest house as a wife and mother before all else. 

But Alina... there was something deep in her, an endless pit of darkness and light dancing over each other like feathers in the wind… there was a piece of her, a shard, that could never be tempered by little apple pie dreams. 

She’d waded through her discontent and purposelessness with the faith that it was a road towards her future, and once she reached the light at the end of the tunnel, it would all melt away like teardrops on window panes. 

But...

Alina wasn't born to be happy with less than everything. She looked at the rocks in the stream and wondered why they were content there. Why didn't they move and clatter along the river? How were they happy with one day becoming dust with nothing left of them, not even a memory?

Because death was terrifying in that she feared never having truly lived. Not experiencing everything she wished to before she was gone and her only chance forfeited for the sake of those who will follow. 

Alina was never selfless no matter how much she wished she was, and the day she finally had that farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, a husband by her side and child on the way, she felt nothing but empty. 

Her smiles forced and digging at her cheeks sharply, feet ice cold against the wood of their cottage, the little things that once passed the time for her holding the vaguest memory of interest... All the purpose and light had leaked from the world, leaving a monotone land of grays and blacks. 

Mal didn't notice, she never let him. Alina is not happy but she'll never let anyone know that. She made the choices she did - standing there by her windowsill and burning holes into the trees that trap her in rather than shield her as she thought they would - and now she's the one who must live with those decisions. 

It digs and stings and it  _ hurts, _ but Alina took her other options at life and either told them no or shoved a dagger into their chest. She ruined those choices just as steadily as she grasped this one with both hands and held on. The full force of one’s doomed faith in normalcy can be a powerful and dangerous thing, as she’s learned - brutally. 

She thought it would bring her the dream she'd been chasing, but all it brought was the realization that she was chasing a fantasy. Without that blinking light on the horizon, there was nothing left to yearn for, reach towards, long for, that wasn’t already too far behind her to ever return to. 

What is there to look forward to? She asks herself sitting at that damn windowsill, a bump in her stomach, and a rocking chair gently moving forward and back like a ship she once rode long long ago. 

Mal leaves each morning, hunts their week's food, she stays home. He comes back and skins his catches, resets his traps, and sits down by the fire to nap till dinner. And Alina... She makes dinner, sets it out, eats with him, and goes to sleep. 

There's no spark. Nothing new or special or interesting to strive for. Her life is just... dull in a way that  _ isn't _ awful. Mal is sweet and attentive, kind and sure as he's always been. She was right to love him as a child, she knows. But not as a woman grown. 

It twists to say it, like a blunt dagger in her occupied belly. He was what she needed to get through the day as a child. But these things shift and change as people do, puzzle pieces refitting themselves into their corresponding puzzles as their borders change shape and their colors shift. 

He was the dream she needed, but unlike Zoya for the- for him- and Genya (for the village boy she once confided being infatuated with as a child to Alina back in stuffy war camps where the only thing to keep them from freezing of fear was the reminders of their families and better times), she never let that childhood dream go. 

Alina was too scared, too insecure in the face of a world full of possibilities and terror, to be able to let go of the one constant in her life. She chose to keep loving him despite how they drifted apart. 

Despite knowing full well the kind of woman he wanted, who would be normal and complacent and happy with a completely mundane life with him. He wanted that stereotypical farmhouse and kids, a wife to dote on and buy eggs from the market, and his woods to run through with a rifle and set of traps in his pack. 

She did them both a disservice in pretending to be that girl who still wished for the same future he did, not that he was innocent either. They were both to blame for this, but only one of them got the ending they wanted. 

(She hates herself a bit more everyday; she watches him through wreathes of steam, freshly cooked food between them, and feels a bit more of her heart chip away. Another shard falling from her chest cavity, steady like breathing, until there comes a day when there’s nothing left of it to give him and she’s hollow all over again. No heart to hold. She hates herself for the numb thoughts echoing in her ears, asking if there’s anything left to lose at this point, even with another heart beating beside her own.

She hates herself even more for the growing bubbling in her gut… She hates herself for hating him just a little bit.)

She knew what he dreamed of having and she knew she was no longer the kind of girl to be happy with that, even back in the war... But she pushed it all aside. Blinded by this expectation that she, the saint, the goddess, the hero, should have one epic love. Something pure and innocent with a kind, normal men. 

That she should want that, and the expectations of what she should be and shouldn’t suffocated her, even before she realized she was drowning in them. She believed them when they told her she and Mal were made for each other. 

A girl who had always seen destiny and fate separate to love, as it should have been, was foolish enough to be deceived by herself and her desperate attempts to keep her heart the golden trophy it should have been. 

The girl who so feverishly denied- him, chafing against the predetermination of her fate with his, would instead allow herself to fall into life with yet another man chosen for her. Because the day she awoke her powers, it no longer became just her heart pointing her to him like a compass. No, it was the desire clamoring along her bones screaming for the last amplifier, in whatever form they could have it, yanking her towards him. 

She’d denied the- him - for the same reason she didn’t deny Mal, and that makes her the most foolish hypocrite of them all. 

She chose to love Mal as a child, yet when the choice was given once again at the crossroads, Zoya's lipstick still tinting his mouth and her body singing with the feel of another man's touch, she'd pushed aside all reason and grabbed hold of Genya's wistful muttering and Nikoli's sad musing, and justified her decision to love him still with those thoughts of meant to be's and perfect for eachother's, willfully ignoring the thrum of power itching under her skin that only quieted when his skin touched hers. 

Just because the other choices she had were unsafe, new territory - large chasms with thin tight ropes stretched across that she could not guarantee her safety when crossing upon - did not mean that Mal was a better choice. 

He was just the safe one. 

And Alina, who's been scared of the world and the unknown since her parents were killed or left her or whatever the hell happened to leave her alone in an orphanage for a decade - she's hated the thought of those tightropes. 

So when the choice came... It was easy. Too easy, in fact, because now, looking at the window with faint cracks at the edges where it connects to the oaken frame of the sill, she knows it was the wrong one. 

But what can she do. Reaching far deep inside her for that roiling sea of dark and light, as if grasping at smoke itself, she calls it to her skin. Not even a flicker of light comes to her fingertips. 

The twinge of hope dies another helpless death, as it has every day for years. The sun remains high in the sky where she can not touch it and the dark in her home's corners where it never seems to move. No matter how she calls to either, there is no longer an answer. 

No sure feeling, no rush of certainty and strength, no power. Like a candle who's fire was blown out by the breeze, Aline is left cold and frozen on her pedestal. What use is a saint without her halo? A queen without a crown? A wife without a heart to give? 

She's failed in every path she's taken and every one she hasn’t, because Alina's been removed from the happenings of Ravka for a long long time, but still, whispers creep into the small town where she buys their bread and eggs for Mal's pretty pelts. 

The Shu have created a substance to heighten the power of grisha while simultaneously controlling them, and the reason of its creation? The reason for all the horror and death it’s wrought on the world? Nikoli's no doubt tried his best to squash the rumors of it but Alina can hear the truth that rings in it's words. 

Materalki, fearing the civil war raging across their country, fled to Shu to sell their services to escape the fighting. The only reason they would create something like Jurda Parem would be true desperation. True belief that the only way to end the- him- and the war itself was to become powerful enough to challenge him. 

If there was no civil war, it would never have been created. If- he- still ruled the grisha and the fold, the Fjerdons would never have had the confidence to impede on Ravkan land while they're weak from the Shu threat and begin their witch burning on Ravkan soil. 

If the civil war hadn't been started by the now king, then prince, and his sun saint, Ravka would be powerful and dominant rather than the bankrupt, scrambling mess that it is with enemies at every side and more grisha children disappearing from their homes every day. 

There’s no  _ right  _ choice here. Both put blood on her hands - soaks them in it - and neither are options fit for heroes or saints or good people. It’s a fork in the road that leads to death or more death and there is  _ no right answer left.  _

The guilt sits heavy on her shoulders now, as it always will. The weight of her friends' ghosts, of Nadia's brother and Onecat and Zoya's family, everyone that could have been old and gray rather than dead in their graves far too soon. 

The civil war was the root of it all. If only, Alina pondered absently, if only there had never been a war. He'd once said that the destruction of the fold may save the lives of those in Novokribirsk but the lives of thousands and millions of Grisha would build over the course of generations of persecutions in result - until Novokirbirsk felt like a grain of dust in comparison. 

He was right and she hates and misses him for it. 

She wants to kill him again and kiss him until she forgets her own name, because then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so damn  _ much.  _

Because that monster that she fought for so long haunts every edge of her memories, every single dream and nightmare she’s had in decades, and every inch of her skin until she fears she’ll look down one day and see two shadows in her wake. She may have loved him once, but she doesn’t anymore, no, she can’t love something like him. 

She’s realized over the time she’s had to sit and think, that he was never something she could save at all. He claimed she was his balance, but he was too far gone for her to ever balance the scales he broke. He was already lost in the blackness when she found him, shadows so thick no amount of sunlight she could wield would ever break through. 

She hates him like skin blistering under a flame, like scars carving out a woman’s eye, like a boy screaming as the night consumes him. She will never see him again, but if she did… Alina doesn’t have it in herself to resent the hardened iron in her spine that would have him dead before her feet all over again. 

Because she gave him his undesecrated death once. Still too close to him and the war, too wrapped up in the feelings he manipulated from her, to see the truth as she can now, separated from it all. 

If he’d asked her to do it again today? She would have broken his legs and left him for the volcra. 

But she can appreciate this, undiluted by her rage. This last piece of advice he imparted to her, the last shard of knowledge of the eternity he had believed she'd live and how to survive it. Because in the end it was a warning for that eternity. 

That it doesn't make you a monster to forget how to feel sometimes. It doesn't make you a monster to not feel anything for the death of a few when you've seen thousands. 

It makes you a monster when you stop trying to stop it anyway. 

She doesn't feel much for the deaths in Novorkribirsk - not after everything she's experienced and all the pains she's lived off of as her purpose for the better part of a lifetime - but if she was put back there right now, she would have made the same choice to protect those people despite it all. 

Because that's the right thing to do. That's what Alina Starkov would have done before she was a grisha or a saint. She would have loved and lived with fountains in her eyes and mountains along her spine, a million galaxies of emotions running through her veins. 

And Sankta Alina is a bit broken and a bit dirty, but even she held a certain purity that the Alina she is now does not. How can she? The thought bitter on her tongue, when she raises her fingers to the light and not a single shadow dances for her?

>>>>>>>>>>

Mal returns to the cabin that day. He returns and Alina isn't in the rocking chair. Confused, he calls for her, stepping through the door with unease in his stomach, slipping out of his boots to keep the snow contained to the doorway. 

Alina would give him a good slap to the back of the head if he spread it all over the place. Well, he amends, she would have before the baby. It makes him smile to think of little Brandon in his wife's belly, growing like a weed no doubt. 

Alina had joked at first about naming the baby Nikoli or David, or even - a strange name she must have picked up sometime while traveling between towns - Aleksander. He had thought her genuinely angry when her eyes went dark from him laughing at her suggestions, but then she smiled and he realized she was, indeed, joking. 

She was always the better at those jokes, able to keep a straight face much better than him. He was elated for their son's birth, but she was ecstatic. He could see it in the way she gazed out the windows, caught up in thought for hours on end, stroking her stomach where he lay. 

Everything was finally perfect as it was always meant to be. It made him feel a thousand feet tall to look at his wife, at Alina, and see how she fits into this domesticality they've always wanted so badly. 

How much the wool blankets over her lap and rocking chairs suit her. How she looks so at home and content at the stove cooking the meat he's brought home from the forest. 

It's different, hunting now that he's no longer the amplifier thing he was before, but it's better in a way. He's much worse a hunter, there's no doubt, but it's all made up by the way everything feels. 

There's no strange pulling sensation in the direction of a deer or a certainty that he'll catch anything at all. The thrill of the hunt, of chance and possibility, is new and beautiful to him. Him and Alina both have finally found a way free of their unwanted power and a way to each other instead. 

His life is all that he dreamed it would be as an orphan with big big eyes next to a girl with skinny arms and a delicate cough. 

But when he enters the bedroom, Alina isn't there. He checks the kitchen and cellar, all around their small home for her but she's not there. The last place, outside, is a hesitant decision to search. 

There's no reason for Alina to be outside, he wonders, but leaves anyway, slipping back on his boots and pulling up his scarf over his easily cold ears. 

"Alina!" He calls. 

The cold winter wind blows away the words in a swirl of frosty dust. It only takes him rounding the corner to find her, spread out beneath their frozen, empty laundry line beside the house they built together piece by piece and loving smile by loving promise. 

A kitchen knife sticking from her chest where she lies flat against the snow, face turned to the clouds in a dying goodbye to the sun she once held in her hands… Alina is gone. 

>>>>>>>>>

Mal's corpse is laid in a grave forty years from now, in a plot that he chose long before his death. A plot with an already filled twin beside it. 

Mal dies forty years before then. 

Not that it matters. Shattered pieces of that reality are swept away into the abyss all the same, swept away for a new world to take its place. 

A new fairytale with the same parts but a different start…. and a far different end. 

>>>>>>>>>>>>

There's no real way for Alina to know it's worked when she wakes to the freezing cold snow and empty vastness of a tundra. For all she knows, Mal's moved her body without knowing she's still alive for whatever reason, _ who knows _ . The point is, Alina has no way of knowing where she actually is, or more accurately, when she is. 

All she knows is that she's alone in the middle of an icy clearing and if she doesn't move soon the stiffness in her fingers and toes will lead to frostbite and a rather nasty death. 

Stumbling to her feet, she's painfully reminded of the fact she has nothing with her but her clothes. Unfortunately, she was not sure she would even travel back, let alone if anything else would travel with her, so bringing supplies hadn’t been a possibility. Going by the fact all she has is the clothes she was wearing and the dagger once stuck in her chest lying by her side, she can guess only what she was currently touching survived the trip. 

Snatching up the knife, it's deposited into an inner pocket of her coat where it won't be seen but can be easily accessed in a time of need. It takes a few hours of stumbling through the woods before she finally comes across what seems to be a small village hidden behind the tree line. 

Alina has no doubt that the people will think her strange, a bumbling girl falling into their village from seemingly nowhere. How can she explain that? 

_ The best lies are those that invoke pity from those they're told to - override their logical reasoning with emotion and their thoughts will be occupied with other things than the truth _ . 

A cruel but powerful lesson she was taught many times by a rather apt teacher until, finally, it sank in. Until finally she understood and was able to use it to her advantage rather than detriment. 

It's still a harsh pill to swallow even now, decades later, when there's no hand to coax it down. 

She has no answer to the questions of her origin, so why bother trying to lie? It's a risk when she's never been terribly good at it, rather bad for a time actually. A lost girl with no idea where she is or who she is... It's a perfect description of her. 

The villagers don't need to know her memories are still within her grasp. All they need to know is; there's a girl with nowhere to go who needs their mercy and kindness. 

Hopefully that will be enough. 

The sun prickles on her skin, like pins and needles, remorseless and quick. It hurts more in her heart than it does her skin, unfortunately that's the worst kind of pain. 

You can't run from the one thing keeping you alive, but you can shed your skin as many times as you want. The heart, though, you can’t ever replace your heart. 

A lumberjack chopping wood on the outward cusp of the village sees her first. 

"Hey!" 

She doesn't even have to fake the limp on her left leg, it stings like something's cut it and she can only guess it was a tree branch or something that she walked by and didn't notice catching her shin. 

She can only imagine what the man sees with her scraggly brown hair - it hits her that her hair has reverted in color, not that she has any idea what that means but she'll ponder it later when she's safe and warm somewhere - and ripped up fur and wool trousers and coat. 

She probably looks like she's not even Ravkan, Alina thinks suddenly. The calculating look he's giving her reinforces that theory. She's never looked especially Ravkan, now that she thinks of it. As a child she had once entertained the idea that perhaps more happened in the Shu skirmishes than she ever knew. 

Was it possible a Shu soldier met a Ravkan woman and had a child? Were they both killed shortly after? Is that why she went to the orphanage? It was a distressing line of thinking even back then, to consider her parents may not have even loved each other, let alone been on the same side of a war she had thought black and white with bad guys and good. 

The idea is foreboding, an air of foreshadowing hovering around it that brings a rush of cold down Alina’s spine. 

It doesn't give her much courage under the scrutiny of an unknown individual, but her story depends on them thinking her a scared young girl anyway, so she's not terribly distressed he can probably see the fear lurking in her eyes. 

"Who're you?"

"I- I don't know." She says through cracked lips. The cold hasn't done much good for her usually sickly body to begin with, much more suited to warm temperatures as Genya had once told her. 

She'd only agreed to live in the bitter cold of the Fjerdon border because Mal loved hunting in the snow so much. He said it gave him a better challenge, but Alina always suspected it was also the loss of his powers as an amplifier. Though he would never admit it, it was still a piece of himself and Alina knew how it felt to lose some of yourself even if you didn't initially want it. 

It had nothing to do with wanting in the end, it was still something lost and you still felt it keenly when you're alone with your thoughts and mind. Hunting in the snow would distract from the fact that hunting in the forest lacked a certain sheen to it, a certain pulling of threads that once gave him direction, just as the world lost a golden glow when the sun faded from her fingertips for the last time. 

Or perhaps it was when she stabbed that knife into flesh. Perhaps that's when the light went out of the world, it's been decades too long for Alina to remember now. 

"You don't know." The man says flatly, scanning her up and down. He doesn't seem suspicious exactly, more sceptical. "How do you not know who you are?"

He says it with a tough, throaty sort of voice, but she can see a shift in him as he observes no fidgeting or nervous ticks to imply lying on her part. He's still holding out, but he's inclined to believe her with a little push. 

"I... There were men- bad men - and there were burning houses and... I'm sorry that's all I can remember." She startles herself as much as the man when a tear slips out her eye. Shocked, she swipes at it hurriedly. 

Memories of what she could have had, could have grown up with, hits her as it did almost everyday as a child. The world of mothers and fathers and open arms and kindness. It's not something she's thought of for a long time given the far more pressing matters always pushing at her in every direction. Pondering at what if's became, not just tiring, but painful as more decisions were made and therefore more mistakes as well. 

"Oh sweetheart..." The man, seemingly so stoic and hard, cracks suddenly. His face seems to open with earnest sympathy and warmth. She hardly suppresses the squeak when he wraps her up in his arms in a bear hug. 

"Well, firstly we'll get you some clothes so you're not catching your death out here, then we'll see about some food, I'm sure you're starving..." He takes her arm and -she'd say drag if he wasn't so very gentle with her - leads her into the little lanes of wood cabins and thatched roofs. 

It's a quaint, lovely little place from what she can see of it. There's a hill cresting the top of the houses with a cabin built on it and a large oak tree, and below a sparkling pond she's sure will freeze over soon. The other cabins are set up almost leading to the pond like a path. 

There are people moving around, men skinning wild game together, girl's carrying pails of milk and woman trailing behind them with baskets of eggs covered in cloth. 

It reminds her strongly of Keramzin. The taste of the past is heavy and thick when she swallows, almost expecting to see a little boy with flyaway blonde hair round the corner going full pelt down the dirt path with a little girl - wheezing and sputtering behind her straw like hair - desperate to keep up with him. 

The man's still speaking but Alina's long stopped listening. He's a very passionate man apparently, talking vigorously despite her lack of a response, but his eyes are filled with warmth. 

It makes her trust him and she hates how a voice whispers in the back of her mind how badly he could hurt her if she left her guard down. When did trusting become so difficult for her?

Probably around the same time she decided to cut the tightropes forming a crossroad and took the safe path down the mountain instead. 

He ushers her into a cabin like all the others and it occurs to Alina that she'll have trouble telling the houses apart. 

"Lobelia! I'm home and I brought a guest!" He calls and it reminds her of mal in the sweetest and cruelest way. Someone yells something back but she can't make it out. 

"In here." He beckons her to one of the rooms. The door opens to reveal a woman not much older than she would have been if she had not come here to this time where she most likely has been regressed in age given the almost parental way the man is guiding her. 

Her hair is dark and black with a single streak of auburn towards the front. Her eyes though, are sharp and blue like bottled lightning. She looks remarkably like a softer version of Zoya actually. 

"This is my wife, Lobelia." 

The woman shakes her head but her eyes are teasing when she looks at her husband. 

"Bringing home another stray dear?" 

He just grins in response, nodding to her. 

"I'm Alina. I don't- I don't have a family name. I don't think at least." 

"You don't think?" Lobelia asks arching a perfectly shaped brow. Definitely like Zoya she decides. 

"Everything before the woods is blurry. I'm not sure what became of my parents-" She doesn't even have to fake the breaking off of her voice. The pain is very much real, though it hits her differently now than it did then. 

She'll love and miss her parents forever, scars she cannot heal, even if she's never really known them. Their grief has shaped who she is and who she will become, and that means she can never truly lose the weight of that grief. 

She can never stop loving them when they're in the very building blocks of her person. 

"Oh." Lobelia looks like she'll say more but doesn't. "Let's get you some food." She says abruptly, waving her husband forward. 

"And I'm Kenzim. I apologize for the lack of an introduction."

He rubs the back of his neck in a show of bashfulness that’s unfairly endearing, taking his wife's hand to lift her up from the chair she's been sat in by the window. Alina has to stop herself from making some kind of expression at the woman's bandaged leg. It looks quite painful, the wrappings going all the way from the ankle to the shin. 

"Accident chopping the wood." Lobelia says ruefully, leaning on Kenzim for support. "But I'll be good to get back to chopping this summer. Then I'll finally be off cooking duty."

That earns a chuckle from Kenzim. They move slowly towards the kitchen and Alina is sat down at a cushioned seat by the hearth. She's taken by surprise with how the two act with each other and with her, a stranger, as she finds herself slurping broth with Kenzim and Lobelia in their quaint little home much like the one she left behind. 

It comes up in the quiet conversation passed over their soup bowls, that she’s not the first “stray,” as Lobelia affectionately nicknamed them, to be taken in by the couple. 

The first with her particular predicament, but they’ve had a few traveling preachers in need of a cot for the night and even a wounded dog once. Kenzim lights up at the mention, describing the creature as an energetic sweetheart who always slept half off the cot and half on the floor but was the darndest sheep herder they’d ever seen. 

Lobelia swats his hand and flatly replies that he was a wolf and they were lucky to not have their heads bitten off in the night. 

She’s relieved to learn they let it out of the house one night and it disappeared into the woods without incident, rather than have it killed. Perhaps she’s soft and sentimental, but Alina thinks of dark eyes watching her raised dagger, fearful and defeated despite the majestic creature it once was. A wild beast brought to heel by fear and greed. 

_ She’s relieved to learn they didn’t kill it.  _

Kenzim and Lobelia are new. She’s met many a strange couple in her life, Nikoli settling down with Zoya of all people, David finally proposing to Genya after she’d arranged the whole thing for him, and even Nadia and Tamar able to find peace together in the vastness of the sea… 

But Kenzim and Lobelia are different. They aren’t fierce like Tamar courting Nadia or flirtatious like Genya, and they are certainly nothing like the sharp tongued exchanges of the royal couple who consider it romantic. Alina has only ever seen love like that, fast paced and wild, always evolving like the dancing of a rainbow on her palms, vibrant and vivacious… but Kenzim and Lobelia are the lull in the tide, not the waves. 

They move around each other like attraction pulls them forward but a reversing pull pushes them just slightly so that they never actually touch. It's a beautiful dance of give and take as they move around the food and dishes, handing each other what the other needs while recieving what the other's giving them simultaneously. 

Is this what her and Mal could have been? It makes her wonder, looking into her bowl of broth and watching the brown swirl in distorted shapes and shadows. Would they even be compatible in that way?

_ Light and antlers, darkness and scales, bone  _ **_b_ ** _ one  _ **_bo_ ** _ ne  _ **_bon_ ** _ e  _ **_bone bone bone..._ **

Did they even have a damn chance?

Kenzim leaves out a cot for her in the small room by the hearth where she can keep warm, giving her a new dress made of sturdier wool that seems thicker and more bulky but far better for chasing away the chill in the air. 

Days pass like leaves in the wind and Alina finds a sort of peace in this little place in the big big world. It's nice, though she knows it's temporary. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t feel trapped despite it’s similarities to before. Because it’s temporary. 

The fleeting nature of it all makes her love it like she could never love the normalcy of  _ before.  _

Lobelia spends the days at home skinning game and knitting long rows of yarn she says will become coats and hats and mittens. 

Alina has her doubts but keeps them to herself. The stitches are lopsided at best but Kenzim still smiles brilliantly when his wife presents him with her newest project. 

The hat's so lumpy it looks like he has cat ears, but he doesn't seem to care in the slightest. It makes her smile as much as it twists her stomach. It's a pleasant kind of pain to see what real love looks like. 

After a while, she asks Lobelia about how she and Kenim met. 

"We knew each other as children. I was a bit of a bully back then I suppose." She chuckles faintly, something wistful and far away in her face as she gazes out the frosted window. "I always teased Kenzim for his soft heart. He was always helping others and I suppose I was jealous of everyone else who got his attention."

Alina's lips curl at the edge, a memory coming back of a grisha girl hanging out a coach window oh so long ago. 

"I was a bit like that with my first love too." 

Lobelia barks a laugh. "First love? Does that mean your memories are starting to return?" Her words are excited, happy for her, but Alina still shifts uncomfortably. She's not suspected - she's not sure these people have any experience in caution given the close knit nature of their home - but she's still not able to completely relax. 

She smiles tightly in response, turning back to her own knitting instead of replying. 

>>>>>>>>>>>

Winter comes and goes and before Alina realizes it spring is blossoming in the trees she helps Lobelia chop down. Calvin, an older man whose back isn't what it used to be, needs firewood for his wife who’s got herself a rather bad cough, and so they're out collecting extra tinder. 

It’s been many sunrises and sunsets and Lobelia sometimes lingers by the doorway while she believes Alina asleep, stares at the back turned to her and sighs with resignation and something distinctly sad. Alina doesn’t fault her for giving up on her memories returning, there’s no way for Lobelia to know that something can’t come back if it’s never left, but it does make her uncomfortable in her skin. 

As if a little girl in a big palace all over again, trying so desperately to not disappoint everyone, to be enough for once. 

They're heading back home when it happens. The lakes' finally began melting through, the ice thinning at the edges and nearly gone in the center, and the children of the village have increasingly played closer to it as spring approaches. 

During summer, they'll swim in it nearly every day, Lobelia tells her as they walk past. There's a collection of boys at the edge of the water and a little girl among them. Alina slows, watching the boys throwing something around between them. 

One of them misses it and it goes flying onto the lake, sliding away from the shore on the ice. It's a small teddy bear. Alina almost sees it happen before it does, the little girl sees her teddy bear finally out of the boys' grasp and runs to it. 

The ice gives way and with a resounding crack, the little girl is gone. Alina drops the wood before she can think, stumbling down the hill towards the water. The boys stare at her in fearful desperation. 

It had just been a joke she can practically read from their faces. There's shouting behind her but Alina can't hear it as she chucks off her heavy coat and trousers and dives in after the girl. 

Before there’s water rushing over her, there’s a memory of tears and darkness and a cold cot, and there’s the memory of claws tearing her heart open from the inside out, and there’s the memory of screaming at the stars begging for a reason. 

Before there’s the cold covering her, there’s the feeling of dying with an untouched body and a soul crashing into her own, and there’s the feeling of wanting to believe so desperately she can’t feel her toes, and there’s the feeling of red and blue and  _ white white white white  _ **_black._ **

Before the ice scrapes her arms, there’s the terror in a little girl’s eyes as she’s dragged under the surface of a sea of rights and wrongs and saints and heretics and the air bubbling up and out of her nose and mouth distort the dark waters of doubt and trying-her-best’s until her desperate eyes are swathed in shadow-

The shock of the cold water nearly kills her, her mouth opening in a gasp before she can close it. Air bubbles rise towards the left of her, giving her the only indication she has of where up is in the black sea she's tumbling head over heels in. Clawing at the water, she finally sees a flash of blond hair to her right. 

It’s a lake but at the same time, the water is endless before her small presence, stretching in every direction of murky black-blue, and lungs constrict against her will at the realization that  _ anything  _ can be hiding in the shadows… Anything could lunge out of the deep, reaching for her, anything could be right behind her or below her or above her, desperately whipping her head in every direction she can, she knows that anything could be there behind the wall of navy blue, and she’d have no way of knowing. 

Something brushes her cheek and Alina will never admit to herself how she leaned into the warm touch, allowing herself to float in the dark with the feeling of pasts and futures against her back. She’ll never admit to herself how close she truly came to letting herself finally drown in the shadows. 

Bright blond hair stands out starkly against the backdrop of blue and blue and blue, like a lightning strike across a dark sky, and Alina remembers all at once why she’s there. This girl is why she’s there and why she’s willing to do what must be done, so that this girl and every other little girl can  _ live.  _ The girl's eyes are open and glassy. Her chest isn't moving. Alina grabs at her arm and kicks fervently for the surface. Hands scrabble across her shoulders and yank her from the black coldness. 

She's gasping desperately as she's laid down on the grass, numbed so much from the water that her fingertips are blue. Kenzim's crouched before her, wrapping her in furs and rubbing her arms. His eyes are large and teary. 

She's nearly knocked over by the overwhelming feeling of guilt his expression gives her. Lobelia is at her side, hugging her to her chest as if she's a babe. The water dripping from her hair hides the tears running down her cheeks. 

She has the irrational urge to ask them to tuck her in at night and kiss her forehead and never leave her ever no matter what. 

It's the cold rattling her brain no doubt. 

"The girl-" She gasps, teething chattering so hard she fears they’ll shatter like glass. 

"She's fine." Lobelia murmurs into her hair, rocking her back and forth gently. Alina realizes she's been crying quite audibly actually. She leans into the older woman and lets herself be comforted by the warmth. 

>>>>>>>>

They tell her later when she's wrapped in three different fur blankets and the hearth is roaring with so much heat that Kenzim is visibly sweating, that the girl was the daughter of a widower. 

She was teased for it mercilessly. For having no mom. Lobelia looks at her sadly, tells her about the man who already lost the love of his life and their unborn child and wouldn't have been able to take losing the only other thing in the world he loved. 

It makes her wonder when she's lying in her cot late at night, staring at the ceiling made out of planks of wood and thatched straw, what happened to that man in her world. In her time. 

If she hadn't been there, what would have become of him? 

It disturbs her to think of it, of how dark someone's heart can become when their only light in the world is snuffed out. 

>>>>>>>>>

It takes a long time for her to find him, but she does eventually. 

She's picking herbs by the bottom of the hill, thyme and basil, when a flash of black in her peripheral vision has her head snapping up. Up on the hill above her, there's a boy with snow white skin and hair so dark it's practically made of shadows themselves standing all alone by the tree. 

Watching her. 

She finishes picking what she needs and sets off back home with her basket. She's got his attention without a doubt. Now the only hurdle is whether or not she can keep it, turn it into an interest in her as a human being rather than a new person in a town where there are no new people. 

Where everyone knows each other. She remembers how he told her once of his isolation as a child. She sees it in the way that the children aren't allowed beyond the lake and the adults look at the cabin on the hill with 2 parts suspicion and 3 parts fear, turning away like the very sight of it could curse them. 

There’s no fear in her when she looks at that hill. She imagines the cabin smashed in like someone took a hammer to it and the lake polluted with red and human flesh, before she shakes herself from it. 

Alina hasn't feared either of them for a very long time though. She has that same darkness within herself after all. It's that shadowed thing in her that allowed all of this impossibility. The knife slicing through her flesh did nothing but release the remnants of a soul that was not hers. 

She unlocked it's cage, gave it freedom, and in return the shadows asked her what she wanted. To change it, she'd said. To stop as much bloodshed as she can. And the shadows had smiled.

>>>>>>>>>>

She asks Lobelia about the cabin up on the hill while helping Kenzim set the table for supper. Kenzim fumbles a dish and nearly spills hot stew all over the floor and Lobelia goes quiet. 

“Don't ask questions about that family” they both warn, glancing at each other fearfully, “they're not the kind you want to be near.” The conversation is mute from then on. They won't give her anything about the boy on the hill no matter how she prods them. 

They simply seal their lips and turn away, even gentle Kenzim who never raises his voice or leaves a word of hurt hanging in the air. It makes her want to scream. To scream at their hunched shoulders and meaningful looks, that she knows the monsters up that hill. She knows and she can  _ stop them if only they’d tell her how.  _

She visits Calvin to bring firewood again and takes the chance to ask him about the pair. 

He gives her a strange look, asking how she knows a young boy lives up there. She tells him of his watching of her as she gathered herbs and the older man merely hums, looking at her thoughtfully. 

"That boy could use a friend." He finally says. She smiles, thanks him for his help, and tells him she thinks he could use a friend too. 

He smiles and tells her to have a blessed evening. Alina leaves feeling as if she's passed some kind of test. It only makes her slightly guilty. Alina’s never cheated before. 

For the first time in forever, Alina tastes endless possibilities, winds her toes into the soil of a thousand different possible paths and feels the freedom of knowing she could choose any of them. 

She could even turn back, the shadows crawling like wolves in the underbrush, sharp eyes and sharper fangs made of the night's deepest blackness. The forest surrounding her has a new path at each tree, but there's also a path behind her leading back to whence she came. 

Alina has never been trapped in this new world. 

She's a selfish monster, perhaps, for the way she never gave that particular path a second thought the whole time she'd been there, standing on the precipice of possibility. But looking at the thin trail overgrown with vines and leaves, she can see how it was meant for someone skinnier than her. 

Someone frailer and more delicate with a bit of extra room for a stomach larger than her's is now. 

Rubbing her hands over her flat belly, feeling the ribs as she presses closer to her heart with shaking fingers, she feels none of the loss, none of the grief, she's heard from mothers' who lost their children. 

Maybe she really was a monster, to feel nothing at the loss of a child that was technically hers. But he wasn't, was he? No, the thought is edged with thorns of anger and rotted love, he was never hers. 

If that child had been hers, he would have been named Nikoli with shadows curling over his bones and starlight carving old hymns into his skin until he glowed with the weight of a saint's love. 

If he was hers, she would have painted him a mural of the little palace with it's sparkling lake and a little gray hut, a red haired woman crouched over a man tinkering in a room, and a throne with eclipses carved into it's every inch. Because she may hate the palace, the man who brought her there, and everything that happened because of it, but she can never forget that it was her home _ first.  _

Before anything else, before a cabin in the dead of winter and a man who held her like she was glass, there was a beautiful palace with birds and trees etching the walls where she learned to breathe, to live, to be everything she was meant to be and more. 

Before there was Mal and a new surname, there was a man and a boy with matching raven hair and white skin, one heart broken but still full and the other dipped in oil so thick it would never beat again. 

If that child had been hers, she would have loved him and the shadows would have danced to see him smile. 

>>>>>>>>>

It feels as if she's letting out a breath she's been holding in since she arrived on the edge of an unknown village with nothing but the clothes on her back and the knife she's long since hidden away under a floorboard. 

Lobelia is out at the market to sell off a few uniquely patterned deer pelts while Kenzim's watching over little Seri, still recovering from her drop in the lake, and Alina's left in the house alone. 

She takes the opportunity to finish her chores quickly, sweeping the whole house faster than she knew she could move. Sitting on her cot, Alina hesitates. She hasn't summoned in a long long time, both in her old life and new. If she was still grisha, surely she would have become truly ill by now? 

What if she truly  _ has _ lost her powers? The amplifiers are long gone now, cracked and fallen away from her on the battlefield when she gave up her abilities for the last of them. Her wrist doesn't itch as it once did during her journey for them, but it still feels... not complete. 

The pull isn't there, not when the amplifiers are still so young and untested and she’s barely more than a speck in the existence she will have, but there is still an awareness of what will one day be a part of her. 

_ Not yet _ ... but someday, when her skin shifts and changes and pieces of her are lost in the war she will face whether she likes it or not, there will be space for them again. 

Her hair falls in her face, brown as it was before the chapel. Before his power became her power and hers became his in the most intimate sense of the term. Before they're souls tugged and yanked at each other, struggling to tear one from the body of the other, to combine them into one being, to become one and the same so completely no force on any world would be able to separate them ever again. 

Before she took his face in her hands and kissed him like salt and blood and death sweetened only by the citrus of his unwavering hope. Hope that one day she would kiss him for a different reason entirely. 

She calls, with everything she has, she yells into the abyss of her chest, cries out for another. Like calls to like, they always said, but Alina...

Alina screams. 

And a pulse deep down in the dark pit, a pulse deep inside the cage it's erected around itself for shelter, a pulse that shatters it's prison walls in a rush and gasp that leaves her like a punch to the gut. 

Light shimmers across her skin like diamonds catching the sun, swirling around the room in a symphony of rainbows, sparkling as if she's a sun in the middle of a galaxy. She gasps a laugh, the sound tinkling like a bell she hasn't heard since she was a child. 

It sounded pure like she once was and no longer is and -  _ it's amazing. _

The light wraps her up in a cocoon of bleached yellow and white, swallowing up the black and gray of her life until color explodes across the rich brown of the walls and along the glistening stone of the hearth. 

Everything is enriched with new life as she watches with baited breath. 

No shadows curl at her feet or reach for her, but Alina expected that. There's still a pang in her chest but the disappointment is no surprise and she's had ample time to protect herself the best she could from it. It will not break her or her good spirits, but it still lingers in the back of her mind as shadows so often do. 

They may be tainted by his touch, but the shadows exist wherever light does, and they are a part of her now in a way that aches in their absence. 

Her hair is deep, chestnut brown between her fingers when she runs them through the strands, and gold threads highlight the shadows between. 

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Alina tells Kenzim she's going to the lake. 

She doesn't call to Lobelia in her bedroom where's she's knitting a new coat, knowing her lies can fool only one of them. He doesn't question her, doesn't even look up from chopping the last of the potatoes for dinner, just tells her to be careful round that ice and not fall in again. 

She leaves with a nod and "I will," and then she's gone. Everything else fades away, the feel of cobblestones under her feet, the thread holding her to the ground, gravity binding her there, even the awareness of others around her. 

Suddenly, her attention is held only by the lake that nearly killed her, that killed a little girl in another time and another life, because above it there stands a cottage she could never burn from her mind no matter how she tried. 

His lips had tasted like loneliness and belief beneath her own, and as their blood mixed together, she tasted that too. There were no words for it but: why. As if both their existences had been defined by that one word; why. Written into the structure of their veins and essence of their blood, why was etched into every piece of them until it was all she thought she could ever taste. 

And among that one singular world, the shadows curling around her feet like old friends and light dancing along his teeth, there was a flash of something, only one. One flash of a memory or a vision or perhaps a dream, of a little cabin on a hill and lake underneath it. 

Why why why why why why why, she'd wondered when he revealed to her his name, what he believed to be his greatest secret, did she see a cabin and a lake instead? She tasted him, reached into his chest and ripped at the cord connecting them until it was bloody and pulsing, tearing out the moon shards from his soul even as her other hand did the same to herself. 

Ripped out the moon shards to replace the sun's embers torn from herself and now his. 

And yet, his name is not what she saw. Or so she thought. But isn't this Aleksander? She asks herself, staring up at the cottage from the bank of a lake she doesn't remember walking towards. Isn't this cabin and village, the lake and everything within it, Aleksander? 

He had told her his name, but his soul had told her it's meaning. 

And now, she would see him again after a mortal lifetime she wasn't meant to live with or without him. It's the first time she considers if she would have lived for an eternity anyway, even without her powers. It's the first time she considers and finds herself terrified completely by the thought of living forever without him. 

He was her greatest enemy and her greatest ally and she hates him for all of it, the kindness most of all. Hating a monster is easy, hating a human being is much harder, and what kind of monster can smile? Can protect? Can make you feel like you're walking on air?

His face, beautiful and inhuman, cuts clear through her thoughts with a vicious edge that sets her fingers twitching, wishing to reach for her knife, to slice and shear away at his flesh until only a bloody pulp remains. Until his outsides match the demon within. 

She hates him but she can’t find the anger that she’s worn as a second skin for so long, when she watches the child on the hill finally spot her lurking. The dagger she’s hidden away in the folds of her coat feels heavy, weighing on her body at every bit of movement she makes. 

She’s not the girl she was, and she will never be that girl again no matter how she tries. But this… This is one thing she can do with her bloody, twisted hands. This is one thing a tainted mess like her can do to make things better. 

She must be strong now, his eyes like smooth quartz won’t break her this time. 

"Hello." Alina is at a loss. Her and Mal had governed the Orphanage in Karamzin for many years before handing it's management over to a few trusted friends, and she'd had plenty of practice with children through the decades... but Aleksander is not completely a child like the others are. 

He's already been twisted even as he was born, he was different, and Alina can only guess at the damage Baghra's fear and bitterness has already caused. Love him, she might, but knowing how to love a child is something that escaped her, as old as she was when she had him. 

Alina may hold a fondness for the woman, but she wouldn't dare say she was a good mother, it would be presuming far too much and ignoring what shouldn't be forgotten. His eyes, inky black as they are in his future, watch her like one would watch a bug under a microscope. 

She blinks and his eyes are the same gray they’ve always been. Unease flickers in her chest. Just a trick of light, she chides herself, just a trick of shadow. 

"You're new." 

She's not taken off guard by the question framed as a statement. Aleksander is still the man she knew even if he's now just a childish replica of him, not yet grown into himself and his powers. 

"I am. My name is Alina and I live with Lobelia and Kenzim." 

He shifts noticeably at the mention of their names. Something wary and unsure crosses his expression, breaking the blank mask she didn't even notice being there. Alina's grown so used to associating placid expressions to him that she didn't even register how out of place that should look on a child. 

The fact she sees even a glimpse of the emotion he's feeling without any prodding or prying... It's impressive for an ordinary child, but compared to the Aleksander she knew, he's not an open book, but a display of every page laid out before her. 

It’s disconcerting and the dagger’s weight shifts as she does on her feet, strangely unsteady for a moment. Alina is disarmed despite herself at the childish distrust lurking about him like a companion, the only companion he has…

No,  _ no,  _ focus Alina. Remember Nikoli, remember Zoya, Genya, everything she left behind to change this. Don’t ruin the only chance there is to avoid it all. Make the right choice. 

That’s what the shadows are chanting behind the trees, slithering between the cottages dotting the path, seeping out of the lake so close to her feet, crawling through the crease of stone and under blades of grass, watching watching watching-

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

Make the right choice

_ Is someone screaming- _

She shudders from the trance, eyes snapping around her for the shadows almost upon her… but there’s nothing there. The leaves in the trees rustle peacefully and the lake ripples with glinting water caught beneath the midday sun beams.

_ Focus.  _

Alina lets out a soft breath, tries to collect the tattered remains of her mind. The trip here did more damage than she’d thought. The shadows don’t follow her command, not anymore, but they still haunt her. They still fill her every footprint, and she’s disturbed to wonder if they always will. 

_ Focus.  _

The boy,  _ focus on the boy,  _ is tangible and real, standing upon grass strands that bend beneath his weight with hair rustled by the slight breeze. He’s real, and Alina grasps onto that with both her trembling hands. 

His unease hasn’t faded, it’s not likely to, but she prepared for that. She knew none of this would be easy, but getting close to him may take longer than she imagined. It’s almost as if… The distance he’s giving her almost makes her wonder if-

No,  _ no... _ But...

The fear she sees in her caretakers at the mention of Baghra's cabin is obviously something the entire village shares. Just a boy, she thinks looking at this child who glares down at her from a lonely hill, just a boy who's got nothing but a dark woman mourning a life she never had. 

How much of Baghra's need to save him stemmed from love and how much from guilt? 

Something in her cracks a bit at the youthful curve of his jaw and crease in between his brows. Something erodes and breaks right down the middle. For the life of her, all Alina can see is a stranger. 

It's Aleksander completely and totally, but at the same time, Alina cannot reconcile that they're the same person at all. It's a strange contradiction to be sure. 

"It's rude to speak down to someone isn't it?" She asks, looking pointedly at the hill. He tilts his head at her and then is gone, disappeared behind the lip of grass and earth she can see. For a moment she's struck with the irrational thought that he had simply left. 

Lost interest in her. 

But he reappears at the lake's edge, though it's the farthest point from her. She steps forward and he steps back, the sharp set of shoulders stop her from taking another. Defensive, so unlike her memories it's almost pitiful, is the way he holds himself before her, keeping an entire lake between them for safety. 

(It’s almost as if someone’s tried to kill him before.)

It makes her angry before it makes her sad but that unnecessary, traitorous feeling washes over her eventually despite how she wishes it didn’t. _ But first, _ there's the sting of Genya's tears in her bitten shoulder, the cracked embers once bright and flaming with curiosity for the world that had settled into David's eyes, the body of a cat held between two shaking arms that will never move again... Black lines spreading like tree branches up Nikoli's arms, consuming him until his irises, blue like the summer sky, have gone dark. 

It makes her angry first, because he knew the pain of being hunted and beaten when you're down until you can never rise again. He knew and he did it to them all anyway, broke them like he'd been broken and hadn’t even had the common courtesy to think twice about it. 

It makes her angry first because of it's spineless hyprocricy. 

But then it makes her sad just as suddenly, because he's just a boy. He's not a ruler or general or murderer, he's a child. How can she punish him for crimes he may never commit? 

_ But she must.  _ And she will, she promises herself. Not now, her knife rests heavy on her waist, digging painfully into the tender flesh of her side, but later. She needs to get close first. Alina doubts he’s harnessed his powers just yet, given how long it took for her to discover her own, but that doesn’t mean they won’t protect him. 

_ Make the right choice.  _

Afterall, as cryptic as they’ve been, one thing has always been clear about her purpose here. It’s for his benefit as much as it’s for hers, what that entails, she can’t be sure, but chances aren’t something she’s willing to take.  __

"I thought I'd come by the lake to watch the sunset." She answers the question he didn't ask. He tilts his head like he's listening to something strange in the wind, but doesn't respond. 

Step by step, she reminds herself, settling into the grass. It's a bit chilly, even now with spring nearly upon them, but she's been in the dead of winter for so long it feels warm in comparison. 

The sun's only just beginning to dip down in the sky, but Alina has little to do with her day regardless. There's no other purpose to be there but this, as it were, and this is where she belongs. 

Watching the sun until the day she can summon it to her again. 

Until the day she no longer fears the whispers and frightened glances that follow the mother and son on the hill. Morozova is only just cooling in his grave compared to the time she came from, and grisha have not become more than the stories told to kids to make them behave. 

Grisha have no home yet, and perhaps she will be a part of that this time around. Alina doesn't know what will happen when she has completed the task she was given by the shadows, has no recollection of being told how to finish it, but there's a thrumming in her chest at the thought of the grisha. 

The little palace, the keftas, carriages, horses, tents, fighting, all of it. It will all come with the age of the grisha, and the thrumming tells her she will be among it all. She will still play her part, though she no longer understands what that part will be. 

She stays by the lake's shore until the sun dips below the mountain peaks and shadows begin to lengthen, almost reaching for her but not quite. Not really. Aleksander is still there, on the other side of the water, but his face is turned to the sky now. 

The fading light highlights the width of his eyes and not so sharp jaw, baby fat still clinging to his bones. 

"Goodnight, Aleksander." She calls out before she can stop herself. He looks back to her, something complicated in his pinched expression. Perhaps it's the use of his first name or perhaps he's never been wished a good night before, Alina can't be sure. 

All she knows as she rises from her spot and brushes the dirt from her dress, is that she surprised him. 

>>>>>>>>

It becomes routine, to sneak down to the lake before sunset. 

Sometimes she's late, apologizing softly to the boy across the water despite the way he pretends he doesn't notice her at all. But she knows he does when he relaxes his shoulders just the slightest bit at her voice. 

Each night she sits and watches the sky quietly without a word more shared between them but a hello and goodnight, and she doesn't look when she hears him shifting just a few steps closer to her side of the lake. 

It's a rather small lake compared to those she's seen in her life, but he's still such a small boy, that it takes many days for him to become noticeably close. It thrills her to see his confidence growing every day. He watches her for longer periods of time, gaze hot on her skin despite the cold, and he takes more steps as each day passes. 

He reminds her of the orphans in a way. They too were nervous of her and Mal. They too were hesitant to trust in any way, far too burned by the world to understand that kindness can be freely given sometimes. 

And one day, just as the orphans began to eat the food she cooked and ask Mal about war stories and follow her into the garden, Aleksander sits beside her at the lake. 

He trusts her, the understanding hits her with a brutal force that nearly knocks her off her feet. He trusts her, just like those orphans did. She glances at him from the corner of her eye, searching for the same glint of danger, the shadows of cruelty that she knows must be there somewhere… but she can’t find it. 

There’s no evil hidden away behind his eyes or beneath his skin, no shadows coiling around his shoulders in the shape of hideous monsters. The glint in his eye is a reflection of the sunset, wondrous and innocent, his features carved softly and gently, not a streak of darkness lingering across them. 

He was the one to be late this time, and she'd worriedly thought she might have scared him off somehow, perhaps being too close to him, and he'd decided to avoid her. 

The insecurities are fierce but short lived. Alina is still the girl she was once who craved attention and praise, no matter how strong she becomes despite it, and he always seemed to bring the worst of it out of her. It's really no surprise this remnant of him held the same power. 

They're so close she can feel the chill of his skin against the wispy heat that's followed her since she rediscovered her powers. Cold and warm, light and dark, black and white... she should have known, honestly, it matches the theme. 

"My mother tells me not to speak with you." He breaks the silence. It's a change in their routine that Alina is thrown off by for a second, always believing it would be her to finally start the conversation she'd been waiting to have. He catches her off guard, just as he always has, even as a child. 

"Why's that?" She doesn't look at him, scared if she does he'll stop and prying open his shell will be even harder the second time. 

"You are them and we are us." Is his only explanation. Us vs them... Isn't that why everything started in the first place? Pushing the world into two categories and pitting them against each other, how could anyone be surprised at the wars that raged because of it. 

And the civil war she, herself, started was the same wasn't it? Watching the sun slowly descend behind mountain tops she could once chop off, Alina finds it easy to admit what she never could before. The war was more than a mistake, it was a tragedy and a farce. 

Alina liked to call it just when she was still leading it and the lives of all her loved ones rested upon its success, but now that it's over and done with once and for all, she can see that it never was what she preached to the crowds it was. Just as she wasn't the Sankta the world wanted or needed. 

She was just an orphan girl with dirt under her fingernails and bags under her eyes under the white robes and golden lighting, and the war was just a puppet show masquerading as a truth. 

In the end, Alina started the war to stay with Mal, Mal started the war to be with her, Nikoli started the war to be king, Zoya for revenge, Genya for David, David for science- None of their reasons had anything to do with peace or justice. At their roots, each and every one was selfish and so utterly human that she's proud as much as she's disgusted by it. 

They should have been better than him, not the same, not worse. For all the shit he said and did, he really did want to protect the grisha and Ravka by extension. When had Alina ever cared about the nation? When had she fought for the sake of something that wasn't beneficial to her? 

They were human and they were young, and there's not fault in that. In being humans that aren't perfect and aren't selfless, because that's what humans are. They're flawed... But that's not something to justify a war over. 

That does not justify the war that crippled their nation at the enemies' feet. 

They are them and we are us. 

"Perhaps. But they are us and we are them as well. I think people forget that sometimes, that beneath all of the other stuff, we all have the same heart and ribcage and lungs. In the end, they are them and us and we are us and them." 

He looks at her, eyes dark in the dusk's light. 

"You are not them." He leaves her with his parting words echoing in her head as she remains by the lake alone. 

>>>>>>>>>>

"Be careful with what you're doing, Alina." Lobelia tells her as they sit before the fire. "Be careful what bear you're poking." 

And Alina, like the hopeful fool she is, nods in silence. She knows it’s a fool's errand, but hope is beginning to break through the cracks in her heart, and light is pushing in. His fathomless eyes return to her, dark with something like revelation, and she sees shadows flickering in the hearth's fire. 

The hope pulses brighter. 

>>>>>>>

The dagger lays under the floorboards, forgotten and unused.

>>>>>>>

She brings an orange to the lake the next day, coming an hour earlier than usual. He watches her eat it section by section, but doesn't ask for any. He still sits beside her. 

The next time she tries bringing an apple Lobelia's gotten from the market that morning. She offers a slice and he takes it hesitantly. She doesn't watch him eat it, but his expectant gaze tells her he enjoyed it. 

She brings a few apples and a small blanket to share. She doesn't give him any fruit until he asks for it, but Aleksander, ever the fast learner, picks up on it quickly. It makes her giggle when he asks her, face faintly green, if an apple tree will grow inside him from the seed he swallowed. 

His face is breathtaking when it's opened to the world like this, Alina finds. He looks at her and she's undone by the floppy fringe hanging over his eyes and the crinkle in his nose when he catches her smiling at him. 

She wants to wrap him up in her arms and hold him so tight the world can never get in. And when he falls asleep against her shoulder, she nearly cries with the emotion of it all. A fleeting hand over her stomach sets the tears rolling down her cheeks in an avalanche of suppressed desires. 

The desire to have someone to love and comfort and hold, to be unconditionally tied to, despite the world and it's dirty tricks. She'd thought the boy in her stomach would give her that, fulfill the desire to be something more, but the child had been stolen from her womb long before a knife ended his life. 

Aleksander was as close to that dream as she fears she'll ever get. 

It's not such a bad thing, Alina considers running a hand through his hair as he sleeps against her shoulder. It's not such a bad thing to find love in unthought of places. Aleksander needs a protector from himself and the world that will never accept someone like him. 

And Alina... she needs a protector against the loneliness, against the horrible emptiness that hides behind each corner she passes. A cure for both their ailments in a way. The boy snuggles closer, cheek rubbing her collarbone and she's afraid all over again. 

Afraid of losing this child, of losing their bond, of losing herself in the life she finds herself wishing was truly her's... But the thrumming in her chest tells her this is not her destiny. 

Her fate is not to raise this boy and be there as he stumbles and trips over the cobblestones of damnation and prejudice, but to be there at the start and again at the end. The shadows never promised her forever, only now and then and nothing more and nothing less. 

They promised her only what she asked for, and Alina finds it in herself to hate them a bit for that. Hate herself a bit for that. For not knowing what she wanted before she asked for it, not knowing how much she would grow to love a boy like winter and death and night, and how much it would no doubt kill her to have to say goodbye. 

And Aleksander sleeping pressed against her feels right in a way her own child never did. He was alien and new to her, but Aleksander is old and familiar like an childhood friend or long lost brother she never knew but did, in a strange way. 

It strikes her that it hasn’t been days or weeks or months that she’s spent in this little town… It’s been  _ years.  _ The time seemed to escape her, disappear in the wind as if leaves, gone before she could realize they had been swept away. 

Her cot had become a mattress of straw and wool, her chores a permanent structure in her life, and Lobelia and Keramzin… had become friends, if not family. It had been  _ years,  _ passed in a heartbeat, like the running steps of little children underfoot, the folding of curtains on a rainy day, the hacking of an axe into wood, the wisps of steam from a bowl of stew… 

The laughter of a little boy who's still learning what his laugh sounds like. 

But things don’t last forever, no matter how beautiful, and the passing of days has crept up on her with a strange urgency she hasn’t felt since the wars she fought in when her days were numbered. 

Baghra hasn't stepped in the way of whatever it is that's blossoming here, but she will. 

Alina takes him up in her arms as gentle as the wind, and takes him back up the hill to his cottage. The path is winding and grassy, narrow with jagged edges that could cave under her boots if taken the wrong way. 

But Alina was once the closest friend and bride of the greatest hunter to ever live and the most powerful amplifier to ever be created, and the forest holds no tricks for her she hasn't seen before. It's one thing she can thank Mal for, at the very least. 

Aleksander doesn't stir even slightly as she approaches the cabin, but Alina tightens her hold on him almost enough to wake him before allowing herself to slacken her grip. Baghra stands in the doorway, a single candle clutched in her hand to illuminate the shadows dancing among her face's creases. 

Young like the day they met, Baghra may look, but there's also something ancient lurking in her skin that she can see just as easily as the smooth skin of her cheeks and red pout of her lips. 

A gorgeous, ugly, young crone, she is, and her son, laid in Alina's arms instead of hers, is too much like her in the worst ways. The ridiculous, insane thought crosses her mind of fleeing right now. Of taking Aleksander down the hill in her arms and running through the village and the forest until Baghra and no one else can ever find them. 

Hiding amongst the underbrush or the trees where the innocent, sleeping face of her little boy can never be twisted by cruelty or shame. She doesn't, of course, she hands him quietly to his real mother without a word and leaves without a bow. 

Baghra is royalty in a way, but Alina has had enough of crowns and thrones. Alina bows to no man or woman, not after all the times she's bowed for so much less. Afterall, Baghra may not know, but Alina is royalty in a way, as well. 

>>>>>>>>>

"You speak of the boy so much, I feel as if I've known him for years!" Calvin jests, throwing his arms around for emphasis in a way that always reminds Alina of the crazy old man in her favorite story, "The Bell and the Elm." Calvin's old and gray, wrinkles that make her knitting look smooth decorating his face, but his fire burns as brightly as Nikoli's when he's sat before her and his hearth. 

"You've lived here much longer than me, surely you've known a bit of him over the years?" She replies, curling deeper into her wool blanket. Calvin's blankets are always the best to cuddle under when the night's cold and windy. 

His home, a safe haven from Lobelia's attempts to avoid the elephant prancing through the room and Kenzim's awkward attempts to break through the tension, is small and warm, much like her "home" - can she even call it that - with the exception of a fourth room. 

And the third one, the one that isn't the cooking and sitting area or his bedroom, has been locked for good. Alina never mentions it, of course, she understands his grief has nothing to do with her. The passing of his wife for more than half a century, cannot be easy on anyone, let alone someone as old as Calvin. 

She does what she can, keeping him company on quiet nights like these, and he brings her similar comfort with his calming presence. 

Calvin tells her he used to be an elder of the village back when that was how they decided things, but they've since changed to smaller encampments that act more like a large family than a governed body. His grasp on politics and democracy and politics is... amazing. He talks about the government of Ravka as if an adviser privy to it's innermost workings, describing his ideas about how to keep power from ruining our kings as happens often and how to keep the rich from destroying the poor for gain. 

His mind, vast and deep like the ever churning ocean, amazes her in the same capacity as it scares her. The way he talks sometimes, brandishes his ideas like swords meant to pierce the opposition's' argument, makes her feel chilled to the bone, though she knows not why. 

"Ah... Baghra and her boy have been here a mighty long time. I still remember when she arrived, she was much the same as you were in fact! She'd no home to return to and her parents were long gone from what we could gather. Lass quietly moved into the village, and before we knew it, it was as if she'd always been here."

"Have you ever talked to her son, though?" She prods. 

His eyes adopted a waxy glaze to them. 

"I did. Once. But that was long ago. I'll tell you that story another time, lassy. It's getting late now." His eyes are dark and chillingly empty. 

She can only nod and leave the house as if in a daze. Something itches under her skin about the exchange but her mind rebels against it. Calvin's kindness, generosity in allowing her into his home and sharing his ideas with her... she cannot push those aside and forget them. 

That is who Calvin is, she repeats to herself, all the way home. That's who Calvin is. 

>>>>>>>>

Calvin Hydregs passes away the following morning. 

He's laid to rest beside his wife in twin graves where they're hands are only inches apart. 

>>>>>>>>

Calvin's death is like an omen. 

She visits Aleksander after hearing the news, sitting beside the tree on the hill since Baghra's left for a rare trip to the marketplace. 

"Why do you care for an old man anyway? Everyone dies." He asks her, plucking the petals from a tulip one at a time like a children's game she used to play. There’s something petulant and jealous in the act, in the ripping of the petals as if he’s plucking thoughts of Calvin from her mind. 

It's unlike him to be upset by her affections lying elsewhere from him, he must know how much she loves him too. He is a child though… perhaps it’s hasty to say he doesn’t hoard her attention, doesn’t try to keep it fully whenever he can, doesn’t treasure every glance she gives him like gold. 

He’s a child and a lonely one at that, and perhaps she believes her grief for Calvin will overshadow her love for him. It scares and invigorates her in equal parts, how certain she is that could never happen. She brushes a lock of hair out of his face, cupping his cheek with a brush of her thumb. How certain she is that nothing in the world could ever do that. 

(She hates herself a bit for how much she wished his hair was bit closer to brown than black, eyes a little lighter, like autumn leaves rather than the night stars. She hates herself a bit for how she wishes he had her name)

"Because, Aleksander, when someone dies, we lose the part of ourselves we gave to them. When we grieve, we slowly recover that part of ourselves until we feel whole again... But a small bit stays with them so that we never forget them or our love for them." 

He doesn't seem to agree with her, staring at her blankly before returning to deflowering the poor plant, but he does hum as if he agrees. He doesn't outright tell her she's wrong or call her naive, so Alina's taking it as a victory. 

Aleksander's never been an easy child to deal with, but she tries her best. He doesn't understand death and mourning just yet, but with time, she's determined he'll learn. He's always been an apt student at everything he's set his mind to. 

She's sure he'll excel at this too. 

He looks up at her and it makes her smile like it does every time. His lips stay flat, but his eyes crinkle a bit at the edges and it takes her breath away, how he tries… He doesn’t know how to smile, not yet, he’ll learn that too, but he tries. For her, he tries… 

Saints help her, someday she’ll have to call him The Darkling… and it may just kill her. 

>>>>>>>>>>

She doesn’t even get to say goodbye

>>>>>>>>>

She doesn't even get the chance to run.

>>>>>>>>>

The Fjerdan's come and there's no time to do anything but scramble from bed and grab a coat before the chaos has consumed her. 

Lobelia and Kenzim are nowhere to be found, the door banging open, and Alina can only guess why with horror at the shouts that have woken her from her bed. She's slipping out of the house, racing down the shadowed path of cabins that loom over her with a feeling of foreboding without a singular thought of what she could be running into. 

As if they're goading her to go see. Go see what's happened. Go see the carnage. 

There's not much left that she finds of the pyre. It's been burned and the empty husk of a corpse rotted away by fire hangs from nails and wood like a scarecrow. Bile burns her throat. The villagers watch in a crowd of terror, huddled around each other as large men with blond beards yell to each other over the sound of sobbing and children screaming. 

Terror runs rampant, and Alina presses herself deeper into her alcove between houses in the vain fear that someone will see her. The men have long knives and uniforms, clashing against the brown wool and sheep skin of her village's people, clothed in their paralyzing terror. 

The smouldering remains of a straw hat at the bottom of the hastily erected cross tells her about as much as the reactions of the crowd. They're horrified but not surprised, afraid, but not for themselves. 

This is a witch burning, a display. The Fjerden's are not breaking any laws here, she understands sickly, for the witches are not claimed as humans by the king of Ravka. They hold no rights as humans do, and so their vicious killings cannot be outlawed or punished. 

Is this how Aleksander's grown up? Is this how all grisha children of the time have grown up? Watching other grisha burn year after year and being told it's not even a crime because witches aren't people? How that must have twisted them... How it must have destroyed their self worth...

The display is sickening. 

Watching the Fjerdons preach to the quivering people clutching each other in thundering and broken Ravkan, proclaiming this as the cleansing of the tainted, the enactment of Djel's will. 

All Alina can hear is children screaming. 

They howl of the witch's smell, acrid and burning to the nose like the putrid smoke of damnation. 

All Alina can smell is children burning. 

The look to the crowd, their blue eyes alight with hatred and righteous fury, bellowing over the body of the ten year old girl they mutilated. Over the body of Seri. 

All Alina can see is a child's shadow growing. 

No conscious thought does it, no command or order, just a feeling. The feeling of a dagger sliding through flesh and a rib cage opening to release the darkness caged inside. 

The shadows feel her, and they come alive. With a sickening crack, a black spear crashes through the torso of the first fjerdon. He does down without a word, eyes catching hers, empty and lifeless. 

She doesn't think of pity, all she thinks of is Seri. All she can think of is the father who just watched his entire world burn. 

And she calls to the shadows even though they aren't hers because they'll do her this one last favor with their master's permission. It will kill her, but some things…. Some things are worth dying for. And she can feel that permission thrumming the string between them, strengthening it with every pluck, every vibration, sending shadows racing down it towards her. Into her. 

Alina tastes blood as she steps into the open air of the cobblestone path. She won't hide, not from this. This is it, she asks the shadows, this is how I know my time here is over, that I've finished?

And the shadows say yes. 

Maybe Aleksander's watching her, maybe he's not, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters more than this moment right here, with her and the soldiers of Fjerdia and making a stand for the villagers who took her in. 

Because this is more than the end to her tale, more than the beginning of his, more than their story in its entirety. Because this... 

This is the birth of the Sun Saint, and everything she will someday build as Alina and then someone else, someone with a new name once Alina "dies," and all the other people she will become after. This is the beginning of their legacy, the moment the dark tastes the light for the first time. 

The world slows for a moment and she thinks, devastated, have I changed nothing? Does any of this change anything? Have I restarted the same cycle?

The cycle of dark chasing light and boy chasing girl, demon chasing saint over mountains and through tunnels and across nations and the very sea itself... Is this what started his obsession with the sun? 

Seeing it in all it's blazing glory bring ruin to monsters?

But all of those thoughts are an isolated event from the outside world, separate to the shadows wrapping around knives and crushing bones and then, finally when the shadows look to swallow all the fire light left in the night, a wave of light....

Spreading and pulsing, flowing over skin and out into the air as if mist, waves of light wash over the villagers, fighting back the dark. Only one Fjerdon is left, covered in the blood of his brothers, he stumbles back from the shadows that crawl up her legs. 

His eyes are wide with something else now. Fear. Delicious, the shadows whisper, mine, the light rasps. 

It's not the shadows that take this one, the leader and the last of the Druskelle, he's not theirs to take. He was the one who latched Seri to her pyre, who ordered the sticks gathered, who lit the whole thing aflame in the dead of night so that the villagers could awake to the screaming of a father soon silenced by a knife to the throat and the stench of burning flesh as a daughter burned. 

Warm blood runs down her cheek and her eyes  _ burn.  _

She raises her hands, glides forward, and the people part like the sea before a storm. She swears Lobelia's wide eyes meet hers and she catches a glimpse of Kenzim's shaking hands in the crowd of brown hair and blue eyes. The auburn streak in Lobelia's hair reminds her of quiet days spent at the hearth together knitting lopsided scarves and days of collecting eggs from the market. 

Of warnings while they cooked stew for dinner while Kenzim was away trading pelts, and nights laid out together on her cot talking of stupid things like the blacksmith's pretty daughter and her infatuation with the milkmaid's son. 

The strand lit like fire among dead grass brings her memories of a woman with one eye who held her head high like a queen with no need for a crown and no throne grand enough for her to sit upon. 

_ I am not ruined. I am ruination.  _

And ruination she will be, it echos in Alina's mind as she raises her arms and lets out a resounding crack of sunlight that blinds even her. 

In a flash of white, the man splits in half, organs spilling into the dirt around his ashen skin, eyes open and lips parted in horrific surprise. "Witch," is all he could whisper in one last, dying wheeze. 

She doesn't turn around. Alina knows what awaits her if she does, the looks of horror and fear that will stare back at her. The revulsion, the hatred... the betrayal. They allowed this girl into their homes, their kitchens and bedrooms, and around their children and look at what a monster she is, they'll whisper. 

Look at the wolf we've allowed into the flock. 

She glances back only once, only up over the crowd's heads where the people are eerily quiet, waiting for her next move. She looks up to a little hill over a sparkling lake where a cottage sits. A woman stands with a hand on the shoulder of a little boy before her. 

Even so far away, she can see his small hand rise and fall back to his side. 

Saying goodbye. 

Shadows consume her, wrap around her like a cocoon, blanketing her skin and face until there's nothing but ineffable darkness... and the tears dripping down her face taste like citrus. 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

  
  


She wakes up but everything is wrong. Everything is wrong and she wants to go back to the darkness and silence. She wants to go back to sleep and never wake up again if this is what there is to greet her. 

  
Alina is  _ scared.  _


End file.
